Frank McCourt - 'Tis

Teachers who venture into the City, Manhattan, tell me they see Malachy in plays.

Oh, he’s funny, your brother. We said hello to him after the play and told him we teach with you and he was very nice but, boy, does he like to drink.

My brother Michael is out of the air force and working behind the bar with Malachy. If people want to buy my brothers a drink who are they to say no. It’s cheers, bottoms up, slainte and skoal. When the bar closes they don’t have to go home. There are after-hours joints where they can drink and trade stories with police inspectors and gracious madams from the finest brothels on the Upper East Side. They can breakfast at Rubin’s on Central Park South where there are always celebrities to keep your neck swiveling.

Malachy was famous for his, Come in, girls, and to hell with the old farts up and down Third Avenue. The old bar owners looked with suspicion on a woman alone. She was up to no good and there was no place at the bar for her. Put her over there in a dark corner and give her no more than two drinks and if there’s a hint of a man going near her out she goes on the sidewalk and that’s that.

When Malachy’s bar opened the word spread that girls from the Barbizon Women’s Residence were actually sitting up on his bar stools and soon the men flocked in from P. J. Clarke’s, Toots Shor’s, El Morocco, to be trailed by a snoop of gossip columnists eager to report celebrity sightings and Malachy’s latest wild doings. There were playboys and their ladies, pioneers of the jet set. There were heirs to fortunes so old and deep their tendrils curled in the dark depths of South African diamond mines. Malachy and Michael were invited to parties in Manhattan apartments so vast that guests emerged days later from forgotten rooms. There were skinny-dipping parties in the Hamptons and parties in Connecticut where rich men rode the rich women who rode the Thoroughbred horses.

President Eisenhower takes time out from his golf to sign an occasional bill and to warn us of the industrial-military complex and Richard Nixon watches and waits while Malachy and Michael pour the drinks and keep everyone laughing and demanding more, more drinks, Malachy, more stories, Michael, you two are a riot.

Meanwhile my mother, Angela McCourt, drinks tea in her comfortable kitchen in Limerick, hears stories from visitors about the great times in New York, sees newspaper clippings about Malachy on The Jack Paar Show, and she has nothing else to do but drink that tea, keep the house and herself nice and warm, look after Alphie now that he’s out of school and ready for a job whatever that may be, and wouldn’t it be lovely if she and Alphie could take a little trip to New York because she hasn’t been there in ages and her sons, Frank, Michael, Malachy, are there and doing so well.

My cold-water flat on Downing Street is uncomfortable and there’s nothing I can do about it because of my small teacher’s salary and the few dollars I send my mother till my brother Alphie gets a job. When I moved in I bought kerosene for my cast-iron stove from the little Italian hunchback on Bleecker Street. He said, You ony need a leetle in the stove, but I must have put in too much because the stove turned into a great red living thing in my kitchen and since I didn’t know how to turn it down or off I fled the flat and went to the White Horse Tavern where I sat all afternoon in a terrible state of nerves waiting for the boom of the explosion and the wailing and honking of fire engines. I would have to decide then if I should go back to the smoking remains of 46 Downing Street with charred bodies being brought out and face fire inspectors and police or if I should call Alberta in Brooklyn, tell her my building was in ashes, my belongings all gone, and could she see her way to putting me up for a few days till I could find another cold-water flat.

There was no explosion, no fire, and I felt so relieved I thought I deserved a bath, time in the tub, a little peace, ease and comfort, as my mother would say.

It’s all right to loll in a tub in a cold-water flat but there’s a problem with the head. The flat is so cold that if you stay in the tub long enough your head begins to freeze and you don’t know what to do with it. If you slip under the water, head and all, you suffer when you emerge and the hot water on your head freezes and then you’re shivering and sneezing from the chin up.

And you can’t read in comfort in a tub in a cold-water flat. The body submerged in the hot water might grow pink and wrinkled from the heat but the hands holding the book turn purple from the cold. If it’s a small book you can alternate the hands, holding the book with one hand while the other is in warm water. This could be a solution to the reading problem except that the hand that was in the water is now wet and threatening to make the book soggy and you can’t reach for the towel every few minutes because you want that towel to be warm and dry at the end of your time in the tub.

I thought I could solve the head problem by wearing a knitted skier’s cap and the hand problem with a pair of cheap gloves but then I worried that if I ever died of a heart attack the ambulance people would wonder what I was doing wearing cap and gloves in the tub and of course they’d slip this discovery to the Daily News and I’d be the laughingstock of McKee Vocational and Technical High School and the patrons of various bars.

I bought the cap and gloves anyway and on the day of no explosion I filled the tub with hot water. I decided to be good to myself, forget the reading and slide under the water as often as I liked to keep the head from freezing. I turned on the radio to music suitable for a man who had survived a nerve-wracking afternoon with a dangerous stove, plugged in my electric blanket and draped it across a chair beside the tub so that I could step out, dry myself quickly with the pink towel Alberta had given me, wrap myself in the electric blanket, put on my cap and gloves and lay on the bed cozy and warm. I watched the snow beat against my window, thanked God the stove had cooled by itself and read myself to sleep with Anna Karenina.

The tenant under me is Bradford Rush who moved into the flat when I told him about it on the midnight shift at the Manufacturer’s Trust Company. If anyone at the bank called him Brad he snapped at them, Bradford, Bradford, my name is Bradford, so mean that no one ever wanted to talk to him and when we went out for breakfast or lunch or whatever we called it at 3 A.M. he was never invited to join us. Then one of the women who was leaving to get married invited him to have a drink with us and he told us, after three drinks, he was from Colorado, a graduate of Yale and living in New York to get over the suicide of his mother who screamed for six months with bone cancer. The woman leaving to get married burst into tears over this story and we wondered why the hell Bradford had to hang such a cloud over our small party. That’s what I asked him on the train to Downing Street that night but all I got was a little smile and I wondered if he was right in the head. I wondered why he did clerical work in a bank when he had an Ivy League degree and could have been on Wall Street with his own kind.

Later I wondered why he didn’t just say no to me in my time of crisis, the bitter February day my electricity was turned off for nonpayment. I came home to give myself the peace, ease and comfort of a hot bath in the kitchen tub. I draped the electric blanket over the chair, I turned on the radio. There was no sound. There was no warmth in the blanket, no light from the lamp.

The water was steaming into the tub and I was naked. Now I had to put on cap, gloves and socks, wrap myself in an electric blanket with no heat and curse the company that turned off my electricity. It was still daylight but I knew I couldn’t stay in that condition.